Five reasons no one will replace Google - <AUTHOR> http://methainternet.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/five-reasons-no-one-will-replace-google/ <comment><USER2> The point is not to replace Google, but to change the rules so Google's strengths are neutralized. I didn't dream this up, it's straight from Clayton Christensen. Since nobody knows what the next rule changes will take effect, anyone can be replaced insofar as any company can have only a limited number of strengths, no matter how much they're diversified.

</comment><comment><USER3> No one ever said anything like this about IBM or Microsoft. This time I'm sure the empire will stay _forever_.

<comment><USER4> I don't know, empires have risen and fallen since the dawn of time. You think Google will still live in year 2500?...

<comment><USER5> he was being sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A linkjack from Valleywag in 2006 [[http://valleywag.com/tech/google/five- reasons-no-one-will-re...](http://valleywag.com/tech/google/five-reasons-no- one-will-replace-google-183892.php)]?

Anyway, companies as big and brilliant as Google don't fail, exactly. They create ecosystems that can keep chugging along for years, as their armies of geniuses build up layer after layer of mind-bogglingly profitable infrastructure. Then one day they wake up and realize the market's moved to something else and they'd have to dismantle everything to compete. Few companies survive that phase.

It is fascinating to me that Google's main campus block (buildings 40-43) is just a _part_ of the old SGI campus. And there really were more than 43 buildings built by SGI. They were occupying them even into the early years of Google's ascendancy, wondering why these Google kids didn't have to pay for their lunch.

</comment><comment><USER7> Their reasons:

\- Google knows semantics

\- Google has the smartest people in the world

\- Google has Marissa Mayer

\- Google is filthy rich

\- Google says it's working on AI

\- Google is not distracted

Hmm.. that's six reasons.. perhaps they should come on in again?

</comment><comment><USER8> As a Googler, I want to say that I don't agree with a single statement in this article.

Things like "Google says it's working on AI" represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI is.

</comment><comment><USER9> Survey: Will Google become self-aware first or will it be able to let you find the missing socks you lost in the laundry?</comment>


New CRM for small business. Free up to 5000 contacts - <AUTHOR> http://universocrm.ru

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty nice, but has it English interface?</comment>


Show HN: LogDNA – Set up Kubernetes logging with 2 kubectl commands - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/logdna/logdna-agent#kubernetes-logging <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I'm a co-founder / CTO of LogDNA. We were in Y Combinator's W15 batch and launched our cloud logging platform last year ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074537))

Based on user feedback, we're happy to announce our super easy Kubernetes integration. No more wrestling with fluentd configs, fiddling with Elasticsearch knobs or following 30-step guides cutting and pasting other people's configs.

      kubectl create secret generic logdna-agent-key --from-literal=logdna-agent-key=<YOUR LOGDNA API KEY>
      kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/logdna/logdna-agent/master/logdna-agent-ds.yaml

We're looking for some feedback on how we can improve this integration. We currently extract Kubernetes metadata: pod name, container name, container id, namespace.

Feel free to try it out. Happy to answer any questions!

<comment><USER2> Also interesting:

I have used the docker integration of logdna beforehand, before moving to Kubernetes.

The integration was done using docker compose per docker compose environment.

The logs which contained `err` were marked red as errors in logdna and I could trigger an alarm.

The same containers in Kubernetes with the same logs seem to marked as `info` now. I am not sure, why this is and how I can get the same behavior as before. Is there a way to tell Kubernetes about stderr/stdout? Or how would I trigger logdna to treat a log as error instead of info?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm this may have been a bug. It should show stderr as err. Let me look into this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems odd that this is getting upvotes. Most stuff is 2 (actually 1) commands away in Kubernetes ONCE you have the necessary manifests.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's odd that it's getting upvotes, but centralized logging is already a feature (as an addon) of k8s. I have a helm chart that's a one-shot for setting up ELK and FluentD as a system service that aggregates all docker stdout logs and tags each stream with k8s metadata, so you can very easily slice/dice your logs even at scale. It includes a cronjob running es-curator so that logs older than some configurable threshold are automatically deleted.

e.g. output from my dev cluster:

          ~CK/elk/templates git:(master)  kc cluster-info
        Kubernetes master is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443
        Elasticsearch is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/elasticsearch-logging
        Heapster is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/heapster
        KubeDNS is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns
        monitoring-grafana is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/monitoring-grafana

I think people want easy management of this, but I do wonder how successful this particular integration will be with such low-hanging self-managed alternatives. Where I think LogDNA will have a win is that you probably also have things running outside k8s that LogDNA helps integrate. So if you want all your k8s and non-k8s logs aggregated, and don't want to mess with it, then you might go with LogDNA.

<comment><USER5> Is this extremely useful chart public?

<comment><USER4> It is now. [https://github.com/andrewstuart/helm- charts](https://github.com/andrewstuart/helm-charts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats! LogDNA is one of my favorite products. We're likely moving to Kubernetes shortly and were actually worried about logging, so this makes my life a lot easier

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks JJ! Yeah, we hope to earn your Kubernetes business :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've used LogDNA for a while now. It has been a good experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! And definitely let us know if we can improve in any way.</comment></comment>


Higher-Order Parallel Programming - <AUTHOR> https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2020-05-03-higher-order-parallel-programming.html <comment><USER2> Exciting stuff! Could you consider also making an elaboration on this blog post where you show how this parallel execution of for example the "square root if positive" function is parallelized?</comment>


JavaScript Simple Fuzzy Search - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wouter2203/fuzzy-search <comment><USER2> Curious if there is a story behind the development.</comment>


Worldwide Network Lets Robots Ask Each Other Questions - <AUTHOR> http://m.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-03/new-cloud-engine-robots-can-learn-each-other?src=SOC&dom=tw

<comment><USER2> Rossie's hand are hilarious. Too bad I don't at sausages.. I'll gladly wait for the pastry cook version though</comment>


Finite time blowup for Lagrangian mods of the three-dimensional Euler equation - <AUTHOR> https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/finite-time-blowup-for-lagrangian-modifications-of-the-three-dimensional-euler-equation/#comments <comment><USER2> You have linked the comments section. I think it would be better to resubmit the main page and kill this.

(Note: Killing and resubmitting the same page multiple times make the mods unhappy, but I think this is a good one time exception to fix one error.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I really wanted to link to arXiv:1606.08481v1[0] because its a really fun paper as he walks through how he sets up the problem (even if he limits it to rank 3 real spaces, but its fun to think about how it could be represented in rank arbitrary-n real spaces and ways of computing such), but figured people might engage more with the discussion on his blog :P

He wrote a couple days ago:

"One possibility is that of a self-similar ansatz, which under suitable rescaled coordinates would become a steady-state solution of the Euler equations with an additional scaling correction to the velocity field. Such self-similar solutions cannot exist if the vorticity is sufficiently localised (basically because of energy conservation), and there are various results by Chae relaxing the localisation requirement, however as far as I know a self- similar solution that is slowly decaying in space has not yet been ruled out. As I remarked in the paper, I attempted to construct such a self-similar solution, but was not able to do so (particularly if one wanted to impose self-adjointness on the vector potential operator, as this together with self- similarity imposed a lot of constraints on the solution)."

And it made me think about how we can go about computing such, and since lately I've been kind of obsessed with the Jacobi-Davison algo, and how it uses the ritz method (to compute the ritz ansatz), could maybe fit here in meeting the conditions of self-adjointness on the vector potential operator without imposing constraints on the solution as it exists? In armadillio's svds[1], they embed their "vector potential operator" matrix X in larger dimensional sparse space reflected along its diagonal:

⎡ zeros(X.n_rows, X.n_rows) X ⎤

⎣ X.t() zeros(X.n_cols, X.n_cols) ⎦

And this has "worked" for other physical systems I computed things for (spacial beamforming with eeg), but this specific application and the care for the mathematical rigor needed to explore more thoughtfully is above my paygrade :P

[0] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.08481v1](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.08481v1)

[1] [http://arma.sourceforge.net/docs.html#svds](http://arma.sourceforge.net/docs.html#svds)</comment></comment>


The return of Python dictionary "addition" - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/803189/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why people dislike * * version. It's ugly, but it makes it perfectly clear that the operation is creating a new dictionary.

<comment><USER3> > It's ugly, but it makes it perfectly clear that the operation is creating a > new dictionary.

I don't see how " * * " makes it clear that a new dictionary is created. Generally speacking, I tend to find operators for complex data structures unclear and don't understand their appeal. It is pretty much the same thing as having methods using two letters long names which everybody would find unacceptable.

Can you spontaneously guess the difference between "d1 + d2", "d2 + d1" and "d1 += d2" with d1 and d2 being hashtables ? Personally I can't. I'm strongly of the opinion that defining a sum for types where a sum is not obvious is a bad idea especially when said sum is non commutative.

From my point view, this is the kind of abuse that make Haskell so annoying to read (with abuse of point free style). I would be sad to see Python go this way.

<comment><USER4> It's already the case for lists, and no-one is confused. (I have taught intro courses to python). People do however get confused as to why it doesn't work for dictionaries, because it's intuitive to expect it would when it works for lists. And none one seems to be confused about the non communicative nature (most don't know what that means anyway) they find it natural that adding lists puts the first list first.</comment></comment></comment>


IBM Seeks to Abolish `Vampire Energy,' Cut Electronics' Power - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-27/ibm-is-seeking-ways-to-abolish-vampire-energy-cut-electronics-power.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand what is the big issue. Why not use a small battery to receive a ON/OFF signal from a remote control and cut off the power completely?</comment>


Scribble: The Racket Documentation Tool - <AUTHOR> https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/index.html <comment><USER2> There is a guile remake of this, skribilo, which is what I have more experience with, but scribble is the bomb diggity.

Scribble-style markup languages aren't "markup", they're merely a series of reader macros on top of a full lisp!

Lisp I tell you! It's wonderful when you compare it to markdown/rst or those horrifying template languages.

<comment><USER3> Another vote for Skribilo! My pro website (just a single-page academic cv effort) uses it. It was way less scaffolding required than Hakyll, I found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is also Pollen built on top of Scribble: [http://docs.racket- lang.org/pollen/Backstory.html#%28part._....](http://docs.racket- lang.org/pollen/Backstory.html#%28part._.Enter_.Racket%29)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm happy to see Racket related things appear here on HN

<comment><USER6> Well since Hacker News is built on Arc (A language built with Racket) it actually gets quite a bit of exposure. I have fallen in love with Racket and I learned about it through HN. Tried to learn Haskell three times and was frustrated and jumped into Racket and it was like when I first used Python (Coming from Pascal, FORTRAN and Assembly).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Scribble is amazing! I've seriously considered writing a Django template language plugin that would use Scribble. I'm convinced it's one of the nicest ways to write parametrised markup.

The main issue is, of course, that now you need to be running Racket on your machine as well when deploying. I'm sure it's possible to embed Racket, but I don't really hear about that happening so assume it's a bit tricky.

<comment><USER8> Vim can be compiled with support for Racket (a.k.a. mzscheme), providing roughly the same interface it provides via Python, Ruby, Lua, Perl, Tcl, etc.

I haven't looked at it recently, but the last time I tried embedding Racket it wasn't terribly difficult compared to, say, Python or Perl, but it also wasn't quite as nice as embedding, say, Lua or Tcl. I've found its embedding interface to be fairly similar to other interpreted Scheme systems, such as Guile or Chibi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use R more then any other language and I always struggle with RMarkDown and Latex documents coming out the way i want them. I really need to add this to my tool set since I love Racket.

<comment><USER9> I keep wanting to create an implementation of R in Racket (called Arket, because R is a PIA to google). And then I never quite get around to doing it.

As an aside, I too mostly code R but love Racket. Learning a bit of Racket is what unlocked R for me.

<comment><USER6> I had the same thing happen to me. I now view R totally different after learning Racket and my code changed. My code from a year ago seems like a child wrote it :) R became this functional language and I can see the OO stuff and avoid it now.

<comment><USER9> I've tried to reproduce toy examples and analyses from R in Racket. Things like plotting aren't too bad in Racket. I start to feel like I could almost code data things entirely in Racket if it weren't for all the R packages missing. That's when I come back to having an implementation of R that I can mix and match with Racket. A man can dream...

<comment><USER6> embeded Racket in R? Though I find a domain specific language like R is just an awesome tool for its need.

Racket project for me are one's that simplify one sub-domain and do that well.

My idea was a scrapping and munging language in Racket. One that could be used with OpenRefine and spit out R code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would seriously love to give this a shot and replace some of the static documents (markdown) that I have. The only thing that's stopping me from it is the fact the HTML output is not mobile-friendly.

</comment><comment><USER11> Having had to write in Scribble, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, and a other similar environments, I'm very surprised everyone is that excited about Scribble. It's not bad, but it was never a game changer for me. Is it just because of the ability to use LISP macros? Is that really that big a deal for you? Personally, I really like Jinja2 for my dynamic sites, MarkDown for writing static documents quickly, and LaTeX for anything where a professional document should be created. What do you think is the major advantage of Scribble?

<comment><USER12> It's similar to the appeal of LaTeX: you can write macros (ordinary Racket functions) to do common things. I could build on Scribble to make an online textbook, for example, with cross-referenced theorems and definitions, by defining some extra Scribble functions.

Except, unlike LaTeX, you have a sane programming language instead of hairy macros.

Pollen takes Scribble and strips out much of the structure, leaving a very interesting core: [http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/](http://docs.racket- lang.org/pollen/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any major players in the market using this tool?

<comment><USER9> Cynical me says no. There was an "XML all the things" craze back in the early 2000s. My wife is a tech writer, and from what I can tell, the vast amount of tooling created at that time is still king today, albeit in a nominally updated form. At least that seems to be the big enterprisey market.

Startups and other hip young companies do whatever's sexy in the moment. This is the sort of tool I'd use as a consultant doing technical things, however, because I can do powerful things quickly. I mostly use org-mode, but this holds appeal too.</comment></comment>


In Defense of the Evil Patent Trolls - <AUTHOR> http://creditcovers.com/blogs/news/8925403-in-defense-of-the-evil-patent-trolls

<comment><USER2> Really this article should be called "Why enforcing your patent doesn't make you a troll", because thats basically what its about.

The fact that there is so much hate for intellectual property that people spread FUD about it doesn't surprise me, but it makes me a little sad.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Of course, there are no patent trolls to defend in said article. the title is sarcastic.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your profession, and what do you look for primarily in a new job? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I am self employed but I want to run away</comment>


Let's reinvent the bookshop  - <AUTHOR> http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/lifestyle/rosanna-de-lisle/bookshop-design?page=full <comment><USER2> I've bought over 100 books in the last 6 months. Maybe more. I wouldn't step foot into any of the bookshops proposed here.

70% of so of my books are from a local thrift shop. We go every week and buy a stack of books at a time. There's stuff here that you don't find anywhere because it's coming from people cleaning out bookshelves that are decades old.

I think the Internet has made the printed book even _more_ important, largely because so many people are ignoring it. Information is only valuable if it's asymmetrical: the ease and abundance of online information makes you feel informed, but usually just results in me-too thinking.

Jonathan Franzen notes in an essay that people used to wait for the next great novel like we wait for summer movies. I believe he goes on to lament the fact. I think this change is for the better; the book has transmuted into a source of arcane information that's of real consequence in business, writing, or, best of all, just living.

With that in mind, the bookshop shouldn't emphasize what's popular, "curated", or recommended. Give me things no one else is reading. I want Zafon's Cemetery of Forgotten Books, not "Yo! Sushi".

A few specific responses to the article:

Recommendations: Amazon's recommendation engine never gives me good suggestions. I think it's because once you've read something you like your thinking evolves and you want something _different_, not something similar. For that reason, I would be really skeptical of the digital suggestion features these proposals tout.

Social: reading is anti-social. Period. It should enrich your ideas and conversation without people noticing. Nobody is impressed that you're carrying around _Infinite Jest_.

e-books: the materiality of a book is crucial. I can often remember spatially where something is in a book. Underlining physically helps attach ideas. When you flip through the book, the lines don't flow to different pages each time you read (very annoying when trying to dig up quotes later). You're not going to read that many books in your life, the expense of physical books isn't really a good excuse.

This is probably all really terrible business advice for booksellers.

<comment><USER3> > Information is only valuable if it's asymmetrical

That's very true. The question is - how do you use the internet(which i believe is more suited than book stores to that task), to find such valuable asymmetric information ?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure it is the only way information can be valuable. There can be an economic advantage to having information others don't have, but it's not a zero-sum game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still think that these truly interesting visions wouldn't save a bookshop. Apple Stores - mentioned in the article - were revolutionary because they were selling electronics like nobody else ever did. They proved to be a long lasting success, so great that it actually shaped a big chunk of Apple public presence and perception by customers.

So, I can probably envision a revolutionary approach to the bookshop by Barnes and Nobles or other big names in the industry of distribution, but I really can't see it working for a single, low capital independent bookshop.

To run a place like that you still have to hire a lot of well motivated and dedicated people, though, and you need to invest A LOT in planning and building the actual shop. Then you'll have to turn a profit from a core business of selling goods at a very low margin, if you want to somehow be competitive with the ease of buying the same exact thing from Amazon or even other online retailers.

Apple Stores still sell highly priced exclusive products with hefty margins, designed and produced by the very company that is selling that to you. That's a control over the complete customer experience that you'll never have for the majority of stores out there, let alone bookshops.

What stops me from joining the experience of such an interactive bookshop to discover some new exciting title, just to purchase the book or ebook later at home from my device at a very steep discount?

You can do the same with Apple products in the Apple Store - try the product live then buy it off of the Internet. Many people do that, but in the end you're still buying an Apple product and Apple is still turning a profit, thanks to its brick and mortar presence. Apple Store per-store revenues show that's not even a problem, though, since they're incredibly profitable on their own.

The fact that Amazon is a fucking leviathan already would fit perfectly in the discourse, but I will let that out, since the whole bookshop 2.0 idea has its own flaws even without dragging Bezos and co. into consideration.

P.s. I find it very amusing that my iPad changed Bezos to bozos automatically, even if that doesn't reflect my personal views on the Amazon founder.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a kindle owner, I have to chime I'm and say that the Kindle can read and display books that aren't drmed and can load any mobile file. So, yeah the Kindle can only take books in the Kindle format, but any digital retailer could sell them.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Bookshops are closing down like nobody's business"

Except that they aren't.

[http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/260752911.htm...](http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/260752911.html)</comment>


DIY biohackers are using CRISPR to do genetic experiments in their home labs - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/285454/diy-crispr-biohackers-garage-labs/ <comment><USER2> Of course some talented and dedicated individuals will be able to pull this off, but it's not really a hobbyist-level activity yet. A couple key breakthroughs could help a lot, such as transforming plant somatic tissue with de novo shoot organogenesis. You could avoid all the tissue culture that is really the difficult part and start to transform less amenable species. Right now you're very limited to particular species and invested in long-term care of sterile tissue culture. Sterility will always be difficult outside of a lab.

Also, what's possible in this sort of setting right now is trivial; looking at selectable or color markers. Anything much more clever than that, and you're looking at tricky cloning, PCR, and sequencing which starts to get expensive fast. If you're making your own constructs, then you need the ability to extract RNA (not terribly hard, but phenol/cholorform is really helpful), make cDNA (kits are expensive, and hacked stuff is going to be a ton of troubleshooting), and pop it into a Gateway system or similar. This means you'll have to make your own competent cells, get some topoisomerase or a set of restriction enzymes and ligases, etc. etc. Buying the decent kits adds up to several thousand dollars, and an amateur might burn through that just troubleshooting their stuff.

Perhaps there is an analogy between biology today and very early stages of the home computer revolution, but I don't think it's a given. If sequencing and, perhaps more importantly, synthesis becomes accessible to anyone, then we'll see real progress.

I don't know much about the dialogue between amateurs and professional biologists, but I imagine a lot of the 'elitism' is just practical concern. Science is very very difficult, there's simply no way around that. There are just loads of things that we 'should' be able to do based on a read of the literature, but when you talk to people you realize that other's have tried and failed. Biology is complex, and sometimes success is a matter of attrition.</comment>


Growth v0.3 - <AUTHOR> http://davestone.posterous.com/growth-v03 Following up from previous posts, I've added:<p>• post-campaign metrics • basic finances • notes (ideas your future expansion) • viral coefficient metrics • basic visualisations<p>All feedback welcome, hopefully some startsup will find it useful :) <comment><USER2> Awesome updates to the original. Worth checking out if you are trying to launch your startup or evaluate your marketing costs.</comment>


Unstoppable Subversion - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.open.collab.net/svn/2007/08/unstoppable-sub.html

<comment><USER2> Subversion is a big improvement over CVS, but it still has some problems. Perhaps the biggest is the difficulty of making branches, and keeping them in sync with the trunk (which requires keeping track of revision numbers _by hand_ in the comments). There have been many times I've wanted to make a branch but just couldn't summon the mental energy to do it.

I've found darcs to be a significant improvement over Subversion. As one example, here's how to make a branch using darcs:

$ cp -r my_proj_trunk my_proj_branch

Then running

$ darcs pull ../my_proj_trunk

in my_proj_branch keeps you in sync with the trunk.

<comment><USER3> Mercurial is also nice, and works similarly. Plus it only requires Python, and is thus easier to set up and use. <http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> SVN has already lost mind share with the real hackers, the thought leaders like Linus Torvalds - It's the new COBOL of the open source version systems. The decentralized version control systems that are open source are really pushing version control systems in new directions.They are addressing important questions about the committer/non-committer divide, which SVN only perpetuates (at least with open source projects).

BTW,should corporate spiels be posted here ? I agree that Collabnet deserves some credit for sponsoring dev of SVN. But is this the appropriate forum for a post like this ?

</comment><comment><USER5> My biggest beef with SVN is that I can't checkout from the repository and have it automatically know when I delete or add files and directories. That is, I have to remember to use 'svn rm' instead of just 'rm'.

Past that, it's great.

<comment><USER3> That's a feature, not a bug.

I don't want all my random files like object files and temp files getting added to the repository. You can implement this for yourself though, using the output of "svn status".

<comment><USER5> Sure, but I'd rather it reflect everything except directories I explicitly ignore (you have to explicitly ignore directories anyway).</comment></comment></comment>


Paper airline tickets to be dead by May - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/they-lasted-longer-than-airline-meals-did/?em&ex=1190347200&en=8a3565c9648481a7&ei=5087%0A <comment><AUTHOR> Incidentally, I doubt they'd be able to get Alitalia off paper tickets by May. Italy seems very attached to the concept of little bits of official paper.

<comment><USER2> They should just let Alitalia die, but it's not looking likely... all the politicians keep conspiring to keep it alive. Here's another one railing on about keeping it in Italian hands:

[http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Economia/2007/09_Settembr...](http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Economia/2007/09_Settembre/18/alitalia_rutelli.shtml)

<comment><USER3> I've never in my life gone through a more bureaucratic, more inefficient, slower experience than any flight I've had on Alitalia.

<comment><USER4> It's all relative: Greeks would love to have a national airline as "good" as Alitalia, since they have to deal with Olympic Airways.

<comment><USER2> The problem is that governments should just get out of the way and let the private sector provide things like air transport. There is no excuse for a bunch of taxpayers subsidizing other, most likely wealthier taxpayers' airplane rides with inefficient, bloated companies like Alitalia.

<comment><USER5> I really don't think it's a public vs. private issue, because I've been on Air New Zealand and the service is way, way better than any carrier in the U.S. My sister has said the same about Qantas.

Really, I think it has to do with communicating a sense of purpose to all employees, at all levels. If a state airline does that, you have a good state airline. If a private airline does that, you have a good private airline. In theory, a strong private sector ensures that firms that don't do this are replaced by firms that do, but frictional costs in the aviation business are so large that this often takes decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of a excellent blog called enplaned that was unfortunately shut down. Someone made a cache of it at <http://www.enplaned.com/>.</comment>


A comet headed for Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/02/comet-headed-mars <comment><USER2> I'm thoroughly impressed with the calculations involved in all of this. The fact that we're on one wobbly, fast-moving planet looking at another fast- moving, wobbly planet predicting the trajectory of a sputtering fast-moving comet and re-calibrating the orbits of mars-orbiting telescopes so their out of danger but looking at the comet while it goes past is just astounding.

I won't be impressed, however, if said comet takes out curiosity. Would give a good first-person shot of what planetary extinction looks like though.

</comment><comment><USER3> This idea got me wikipedia'ing around. Really interesting article here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance>

Seems like if a comet were headed to earth, the best bet would be to get as much mass into space, and shoot it as fast as you can in order to knock it off course.

Much less fun than a Bruce Willis shlock disaster movie, but seems pretty practical.

<comment><USER4> Depends on how much time you have and how big we're talking about. If you have years, or lets say a decade, you'd probably try a bunch of things in parallel. Some strategies could be crazier than others, but you wouldn't waste too much time on things that have huge technological risk. Landing a automated mining robot + mass driver seems far-fetched. As does painting it (for something kilometers in diameter, how would that work exactly?)

So you're probably talking about one or more kinetic impactor missions to try and deflect it billiard ball-style. Before those actually launch, the laser- ablation strategy seems like a pretty attractive option to do in parallel. You'd build an array of lasers that ablate the surface of the asteroid, ejecting material that works as reaction mass. Northrop has 100kw solid-state lasers working right now: <http://optics.org/news/1/7/13>

Seems plausible that you could get something up and running quickly to see if it would work. Before either scaling it up or dropping back on the riskier impactor missions.

<comment><USER5> Ablation is the best bet if you need to move something as much as possible as fast as possible. And for that you want a device which outputs a lot of EM radiation at tremendous power levels and ideally is as compact as possible in order to transport it near enough to the object. Nuclear weapons meet all those criteria and so are likely to be the best tools for pushing around big rocks quickly on short notice. You simply explode them at an appropriate stand-off distance and the energy release of mostly soft x-rays causes the surface near the explosion to ablate, generating thrust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So we could in theory deflect an object away from a collision towards Earth. How hard is it to make this comet hit Mars for sure?

Just a thought.

<comment><USER7> Making the comet hit should be much harder than deflecting one. Becaues planets are such small targets in the grand scheme of things.

<comment><USER8> The trajectory of this comet makes things especially difficult. It is moving fast, travelling in the opposite direction of all the planets and is coming in at a large angle relative to the plane of the solar system. From Phil Plait's post it will be moving at over 55km/s relative to Mars during the flyby/impact. Simply intercepting this comet is basically impossible today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope it misses. It will mess up our equipment on Mars if dust is flying everywhere.

But if it does get hit, I hope that the people of our planet can start focusing more on technology development for energy, propulsion, protection, insulation, and terraforming. As for everything else (other than praying), those can be extracurriculars. The main obstacle to this would be the lack of immediate incentive. The asteroid mining companies try to provide future incentive by saying there are resources to be mined. However, to completely change our culture, education, and occupations to gear towards space colonization, we'll need a lot more than that.

<comment><USER10> Imagine having eyes on the ground for such a stupendous event! It would be a once-in-a-civilization opportunity. Fingers crossed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Relatively speaking, there is very little data to go off of as of now. The comet hasn't been tracked long enough for them to truly see if it will even be close to Mars.

I do think, however, that if it does look well on its way to hitting Mars, it'd be worth while to send a large chunk of mass and try to push it in another direction. It could prove to be a trial for a future, Earth- threatening instance. So far the ability to deflect a comet/asteroid is only a theory--putting it to practice is a great way to test it.

<comment><USER12> I've actually heard it said that the benefits of allowing it to hit Mars would be greater, since we would learn a lot from the event and use that knowledge to explain what happened to our own planet 65 million years ago. In addition, some scientists mentioned the possibility that an impact of such magnitude might help terraform Mars (although admittedly I've only heard the soundbites and haven't looked into the actual science of it).

<comment><USER11> Hmm I guess that makes sense but there are two options I see:

1) The comet hits Mars, has negative effects on the planet but we end up learning a lot about what happened to Earth.

2) We deflect the comet, learn how to protect ourselves from such things in the future, and we can still visit Mars in the future and hope for life on there.

Now obviously I demonstrated a bias above, but I definitely think it's more worth our time to look into the future than what happenED--especially in this situation. Right now, there are more discussions/plans of humans visiting Mars than there ever has been. A comet hitting the planet would most likely cancel or severely postpone many of those plans.

Learning how to protect ourselves should be prioritized, then discovery should be close after. Both of these may become delayed processes if we just allow a comet to hit Mars. Let me know your thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > If it really is that big, and if the comet were to hit the side of Mars > facing Earth (it seems that it might do, but it might also hit the far side)

...

</comment><comment><USER14> uhmmm... has anyone calculated the risk of this comet hurtling towards earth after being projected by a near miss of Mars?

<comment><USER15> Very, very improbable -- the risk to Earth from this comet is much less than the risk from any number of similar objects in unrelated orbits. And the latter risk is very low.

The fact that this comet is going to approach Mars doesn't mean it presents any plausible risk to Earth.</comment></comment>


The Doors' Ray Manzarek has Died - <AUTHOR> http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2013/05/rip-the-doors-ray-manzarek.html

<comment> o0-0o Hope he's having a beer with Jim right about now. God bless.

<comment><USER2> Break on through to the other side.</comment></comment>


Giant predatory worms invaded France, but scientists just noticed them - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/22/giant-predatory-worms-invaded-france-but-scientists-just-noticed-them/ <comment><USER2> Is it me or is there only this scientist (Jean-Lou Justine [0]) who reports about this invasion?

All articles that I find in French are written since a few days only and they point directly or indirectly to M. Justine and all have the nearly the same wording and pictures as in the WP article "

[0] [http://isyeb.mnhn.fr/directory/pages- personnelles/article/ju...](http://isyeb.mnhn.fr/directory/pages- personnelles/article/justine-jean-lou?lang=fr)

</comment><comment><USER3> > A colleague once tried to put a flatworm in his mouth, Justine recounted. > The man still describes it as "one of the worst experiences of his life."

You just gotta love scientists.</comment>


Whatsapp is currently down worldwide, affecting thousands of users - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/611154/WhatsApp-Down-Problem-Message-App-Outage-Not-Working-Worldwide-International-Crashes <comment><USER2> Wait, 'thousands of users'? I though Whatsapp daily user base was nearing a billion by now... so, is this a very rare failure or...? Because honestly, if it's a total outage, then it this is likely on the order of the entire telephone system for the U.S. going down one day, if not more significant.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not too sure, but I have a friend here, sitting beside me and he can easily send and receive messages from other people. So I'm pretty sure it hasn't affected every WhatsApp user everywhere. Maybe it's a matter of a new built released for specific phones, or maybe it just affects a random set of people.</comment></comment>


The Quest for the Perfect Office Chair: Why we haven't found it - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2012/05/ergonomic_office_chairs_a_visual_history_photos_.single.html <comment><AUTHOR> Other discussion:

How to hack yourself a standing desk: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438140>

Good Aeron / knock off alternatives: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588203></comment>


Don't need it? Don't install it. - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/security/79064/dont-need-it-dont-install-it <comment><USER2> The real lesson is that Apple sucks at software, and you should use open source.

I have never had an open source program install crap on my machine. I install probably 2-3 new programs per month and have been doing so for years. I've never had any problems... expect that one time I tried to download iTunes, found out that Apple sucked, and vowed to never use Apple software again.</comment>


The Colonization of Space, by Gerard K. O'Neill - <AUTHOR> http://www.nss.org/settlement/physicstoday.htm <comment><USER2> Funny to see that these predictions are from 1974.</comment>


Android location service cache dumper. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/packetlss/android-locdump

<comment><USER2> [http://netmite.com/android/mydroid/frameworks/base/location/...](http://netmite.com/android/mydroid/frameworks/base/location/java/com/android/internal/location/LocationCache.java)

It appears that unlike Apple, this isn't unlimited:

        // Cache sizes
        private static final int MAX_CELL_RECORDS = 50;
        private static final int MAX_WIFI_RECORDS = 200;

Edit: Seems like another very important difference is that the Android cache only keeps track of your last timestamp at a given tower. Even if this cache was unlimited it couldn't be used to plot someones position over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> The unlimited size of Apple's cache is probably just a mistake. It makes no sense to store it on the device for tracking purposes. I assume they log this info when the device requests the info from Skyhook (or whatever location provider they have now) anyway.

<comment><USER3> I can confirm that the Android cache.cell and cache.wifi lists are very limited. I just checked mine using your parse.py, and was only able to see 50/200 total records respectively. My cell data only went as far back as 13 days ago.

"The unlimited size of Apple's cache is probably just a mistake."

I think this is what concerns people most. This "mistake" has your triangulated location based on cell towers tracked for years and years, across multiple devices, when there really is no recognizable need to store/cache this much location data for this long. It seems, judging by the above linked source-code, that Android has it right on this one.

<comment><USER4> I ran the program and looked at my iPhone dump, and it is not that exact and I live in NYC. It truly appears to just tag position of towers. Where it shows the dots for me is not exact or even close positions most of the time, and even locations that I've never been to but the nearest tower I must've connected to.

Which is helpful for me since I've long suspected AT&T has a dearth of towers in my section of the UES, maybe I can get a microcell out of this, haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand the outrage on this-- your wireless carrier probably has an identical file somewhere as well. At least you have a copy of it.

My suggestion: for the next YC application, invent a way for people to sell this data back to marketeers. I'll sell my data for a lot less than what Apple's or AT&T are charging.

<comment><USER6> > your wireless carrier

and _only_ your wireless carrier. Now anyone who you lend your phone to while you take a bite to eat can read your location data. Or Apple. Perhaps if it's not encrypted, and there's an iOS vulnerability, _anyone_ could read the data. Not just your wireless carrier.

That's why this is a big deal. Why store this data? If it most be stored, why has _no_ effort been put in to keeping it safe? Just because one company could read it before doesn't mean that it's okay others can too. We naturally assume (and rightly so) that our wireless carriers can and do track our every move. But we "trust" them; we sure as hell don't trust anyone else.

Edit: And it's even creepier that this was secret. It's not like we're getting mad at official Apple TOS or policy; they _didn't tell us_ they were tracking our location and storing the data forever and ever. Fuck that, that's scary and unpleasant.

<comment><USER5> The FBI has my FBI file and only the FBI file. By this logic, I shouldn't FOIA for my FBI file because someone could break into my house and steal it.

Also, I carry a lot more sensitive information on my phone than the cellphone towers it talks to-- I suspect this is the same for most people. Anybody that's installed, say "Mint" on their iphone, has used the "email" application, or sent the occasional drunken SMS message probably has a lot more to worry about than the location data stored on their phone.

I guarantee you I protect the data on my phone a lot more than Apple does. Apple sells it. Here's an opportunity for me to sell it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> the problem i have with this is given the recent michigan ruling saying police can dump, retain, and peruse data from a cell phone during a traffic stop, this gives access to far more data than should be possible without a warrant, without "physical possession of the phone" in the sense of actual seizure.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think anyones concerned that it tracks you with cached data (47 entries in github example, date spread would imply ~ 1 month) -- the concern w/r/t apple is that there seems to be no limit to the amount of logging retained.

I won't get into paranoia mode, or conspiracy theories, _but_ I am fine with either phone being aware of my location, and even my recent movements (subject to disclosure) -- I am NOT fine with that log being undisclosed and perpetual

<comment><USER9> Except it's not tracking your location, it's tracking cell towers. I'm sure a lot of cell phones do this, to a different degree of "log length". The issue I have with a perpetual log of cell towers is not a privacy one, it's a space one (how long will the log be in a couple of years).

But hey, I'm not stopping anyone from hopping into the most recent episode of the iPhone hating bandwagon. It's what makes the internet go round (any hate bandwagon for that matter)

<comment><USER10> > Except it's not tracking your location, it's tracking cell towers.

That's true in the sense that mercury thermometers do not measure temperature -- they measure the height of a column of mercury.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> during the cold war the secret police job was at least somehow interesting and romantic

now it's all about a pair of sql queries or regexps.

</comment><comment><USER12> "You will need root access to the device to read this directory."

It's not even in the same realm.

<comment><USER13> Why? You need the user's iPhone or their computer in your physical possession to read the iOS location cache.

<comment><USER12> Because I can grab your phone, plug it in and have all of your history. If you grabbed my phone running 2.3.3 on the Nexus S... it would be impossible to get to that data without going through the entire bootloader unlock process which is obviously invasive.

Imagine scenarios where people are reading your location data. Authorities, governments, espionage... all of them would be largely foiled due to the fact that root access is required and gaining that root access would leave trails.

Do I really have to explain the difference between data easily accessed via usb and data that is stored in protected areas of the rom on an Android device? Spot on with your comment voting there HN. Thanks as usual.

<comment><USER13> > Because I can grab your phone, plug it in and have all of your history

OK, but you've already _got my phone_!

Authorities and governments aren't foiled, they just got to AT&T and get the data from its source (where, incidentally, I can't have tampered with it).

As for espionage, I rather suspect the CIA and its foreign counterparts can figure out a way to root my phone quietly.

<comment><USER12> It's a cell phone. Much easier to misplace, lose, have fall out of your pocket, etc than any other computing device.

Again, it's not in the same realm considering that it's protected inside the ROM of the phone. Even if you HAD my Android phone, it's not game over. Please, go buy a Droid X, upgrade to the latest OTA rom for which there is no root exploit.

Then try to get into the (already very limited) timestamp/tower data on my phone. You won't be able to. That's my point. On the other hand, with your iPhone, like I said, "I've already got your phone" and it's game over for your location data.

How about just girlfriends, bosses, etc? Anyone with a usb cable and another mobile phone or laptop knows (roughly) exactly where you've been going for months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As the owner and user of an Android phone, great, just great.

Let's ask the so-far unasked question: Why? Both Google and Apple built in location-caching. Seems mighty suggestive of something, maybe something like the color printer Mysterious Yellow Ink dots ([http://www.instructables.com/id/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is- Yo...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Your-Printer- Spying-on-/)).

<comment><USER2> I'm assuming caching cell towers and wifi improves performance. An unlimted cache is a bad thing, a limited cache is a good thing.

<comment><USER15> I'd argue that is it neither, but is instead so that both Apple and Google can eventually offer localized and personalized marketing dependent on the area that your phone is reporting that you are in or have been in fairly frequently. An example would be giving you a discount code for that restaurant that you have passed by 4 times in the last 2 weeks at around dinner time. This is part of my theory about why apple is building the enormous data center in NC.

<comment><USER2> I may be wrong but looking at the code and example data it seems that the Android cache only keeps track of the latest time stamp at a given cell tower so it wouldn't know the frequency of visits in an area. This is definitely a possibility for the iOS cache but I can't imagine this would bode well for the privacy-conscious folks.

<comment><USER15> I agree, but at the end of the day anyone that is that concerned about their privacy and even remotely tech savvy will be able to find a way to opt out. A friend sent me the below article about a utility for jail broken phones that can be used to get rid of the tracking data. In regards to the Google data, does it appear to you that the latest timestamps are transmitted anywhere? The way Google rolls I would speculate that they would use timestamps and location with their amazing maps resources and cloud storage to independently store all of the metrics.

[http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/04/21/worried-about- iphone-...](http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/04/21/worried-about-iphone- tracking-jailbreak-utility-untrackerd-will-fix-that-for-you/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Laser-generated surface structures create extremely water-repellent metals - <AUTHOR> http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/superhydrophobic-metals-85592/ <comment><USER2> A great achievement.

I would like to have seen it dipped. Also demonstrated with contaminated water of some kind, maybe flour & water paste.

He states it would not degrade, but surely expansion and contraction will take a toll on nanoscale etchings, as well as abrasion and acid content of airborne contaminants.

<comment><USER3> The surface, upon visual inspection in the video looks rough. What happens say if the surface is regularly in contact with skin during a practical application? Does the skin get abraded into the microstructure of the material surface and degrade its hydrophobic properties?

Looks amazing though watching the water spread out and spring back that much. Simply incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And Chunlei does it again. I was an undergraduate when he arrived and helped set up the first UHV chamber for his initial tests. Let me just say that not only is he brilliant but he is also about as down to earth a person as you could ever meet. He seriously has no ego, is easy going and has an internal drive that's unbelievable.

If he ever wants to start a company, whomever he reaches out to, fund him.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would love to learn more about the structure of the patterns etched into the metals. I took a quick look through the links from the article, but didn't find anything with meat. Does anyone have a link?

I'd love to see it under a microscope, or see a visualization of the pattern. Is the strategy to maximize the surface area of an existing hydrophobic material?

<comment><USER6> Link to the paper [1] (with microscopy images) in the Journal of Applied Physics leads the 3rd paragraph of the article.

[1] [http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/117/3/10.10...](http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/117/3/10.1063/1.4905616)

<comment><USER7> Fantastic, thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Shark skin has similar properties. The sharks use it for super efficient swimming, it reduces their drag considerably.

[http://www.asknature.org/strategy/038caf2e453c09b3016465cc6c...](http://www.asknature.org/strategy/038caf2e453c09b3016465cc6ca93605)

Car wash companies will hate this stuff, and wouldn't it be nice if it could be etched into windshields, no more wipers!

<comment><USER9> You still need to wash off the dust, so some sort of wipers are needed still.

When swimming, the drag is pretty minor, most of your energy is spent on the displacement of water. That's true with fish, and with ships and boats.

<comment><USER10> "As the water bounces off the super-hydrophobic surfaces, it also collects dust particles and takes them along for the ride... Better yet, it remains completely dry."

<comment><USER11> That requires a sufficient water-to-dust ratio. Driving jeeps in the Congo, or having dust blown up from dunes in a sudden gust, will require wipers. Not to mention pollen.

<comment><USER12> Couldn't you still have sprayers that would help with this?

<comment><USER11> Hmm, that's not a bad idea! Current sprayers would obviously be inefficient because they rely on wipers to spread fluid widely over the windshield, but I'm sure that could be changed. (Such as a top pressure-rail for dispensation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do hydrophobic materials interact differently with gases as well? What would the air flow be like over a wing made out of a superhydrophobic material like this? Would it facilitate or disrupt airflow, or not matter?

<comment><USER8> Yes, that's been done:

[http://www.lufthansa-technik.com/famos](http://www.lufthansa- technik.com/famos)

See sharkskin bit above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hydrophobicity alone is only so useful.

Teflon became a thing because it's both hydrophobic and lipophobic. There are lots of hydrophobic surfaces that work very well until you get dirt, finger oils, soap, or just about anything that isn't water-soluble on them. There may also be an issue here with friction damage.

Hopefully the _technique_ here can be adapted to practical products.

<comment><USER7> The technique is extremely flexible. I'm sure they'll figure out an etching pattern that is both extremely lipophobic and hydrophobic. Only hydrophobia has many applications already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wanted to know more about the practical applications of the syperhydrophilic metals (the counter-technology of the one discussed here), and found this video [1] with Chunlei informative.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtDPsWd6Yqw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtDPsWd6Yqw)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm looking for superhydrophobic materials for my next car so its easier to keep clean.

</comment><comment><USER16> Am I twisted when I first thought of non stick, non coated cookware when I saw the title.

Great achievement.

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't a hydrophobic surface attract oils?

(maybe that's only the case for chemical hydrophobicity rather than structural)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think this could have a great impact on water vessels. I wonder if they can do the same sort of thing on a fiberglass surface...

It's a good thing the Olympics banned those full-body swimsuits. This would be the next million-dollar suit.

<comment><USER19> My thoughts exactly... maybe because I'm reading _Sail Performance_ at the moment! Weight, durability and shapability would be important properties vs. the nominal reduction in drag, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome! I look forward to my teflon pans that I don't have to throw away after 6 months because they stop working.

<comment><USER21> 6 months? I think you're doing something wrong here. Keep teflon coated material to low temperatures, use plastic/wood/silicone utensils and avoid abrasive cleaning techniques.

<comment><USER22> >Keep teflon coated material to low temperatures

How exactly do you cook with it then?

<comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene#Safety](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene#Safety)

"While PTFE is stable and nontoxic at lower temperatures, it begins to deteriorate after the temperature of cookware reaches about 260 °C (500 °F), and decomposes above 350 °C (662 °F).

…

Meat is usually fried between 204 and 232 °C (399 and 450 °F), and most oils start to smoke before a temperature of 260 °C (500 °F) is reached, but there are at least two cooking oils (refined safflower oil and avocado oil) that have a higher smoke point than 260 °C (500 °F). Empty cookware can also exceed this temperature when heated."

<comment><USER24> This is a pretty big design flaw for someone like me who loves putting a good sear on steak. Good thing cast iron is fairly cheap...

<comment><USER25> Did you have some implicit expectation that you could heat it for an arbitrary amount of time, at full power, and it would just be fine? Almost all of the spot checking I just did shows temperature warnings / upper limits of around 450 degrees F for non-stick pans, right on their packaging.

Also, equivalently-sized cast iron pans are almost always cheaper than their quality non-stick (i.e. Calphalon) counterparts, and you can restore them if you jack up the seasoning on them.

<comment><USER26> Did you reply to the wrong comment?

The comment you reply to doesn't complain about their use of teflon (a complaint you imply in your first paragraph) and they praise the cheapness of cast iron (which you repeat with an 'also' in your second paragraph, the 'also' makes it look like you are trying to correct their understanding of the relative situation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder what sort of metals this process would work with effectively and whether surfaces can be reprocessed over time.

</comment><comment><USER28> Honest question, would steel rust just by liquid water, or vapor and oxigen in the air will make it rust eventually?

<comment><USER29> Water vapor in the form of humidity is sufficient to initiate the rusting process.

Most questions along this line are addressed on this page:

[https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=485](https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=485)

Note that if you try to avoid the formation of rust by submerging your steel in water, thinking that will remove the oxidative air component, you run into corrosion issues unless you are submerging in a tank of constantly refreshed distilled water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was hoping to see the drop size decreased to the point where it no longer was repelled.

</comment><comment><USER31> This specifically repel water, or can it repel any liquid?

<comment><USER18> Generally, hydrophobic substances won't repel nonpolar substances such as oil.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrophobic_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrophobic_effect)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Awesome. Looking forward for a finally lipophobic smartphone. In fact, in the future all surfaces of consumer electronics and other stuff should be superhydrophobic.

<comment><USER33> I think there are far better ways to do this on a small object of limited lifespan like a smartphone, not to mention that metal is not an ideal way to make a smartphone. You can use it some surfaces, but at some point you'll need plastic and glass.

<comment><USER32> "I think there are far better ways to do this on a small object of limited lifespan like a smartphone"

Namely?

<comment><USER33> Simple hydrophobic coating. It wears out eventually, but by the time it does your device is already gathering dust in a drawer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google to buy Frommer's - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444772404577587131075164366.html

<comment><USER2> Having ran a travel directory site for a bit I'm always interested in Google's ambitions in the space. I still haven't completely understood why Google bought Zagat, and now Frommer's is a bit odd as well. My theories -

1) Small business relationships - well established relationships with long- established small businesses that may never have tried advertising online. Every listing is a potential new Adwords customer. I know someone who worked with Zagat and the 1st thing they did was swap out the ad network, so I'd say this is reason #1. These guys have very trusting and loyal ad partners

2) Brand recognition and perception of quality control in consumer listings.

3) Databases - its really hard to get a complete database of small business info from foreign countries. Googlebot is just never going to as good of a job cleaning up this content as a decent editorial staff. These guys have been intricately compiling and updating DBs of eateries and attractions for decades.

4) The guidebooks - I doubt the revenue from selling paper guidebooks means much to Google, but it might be a lesson in selling digital content, who knows

5) They acquired them both for a steal. A bunch of editors working for peanuts, content and new adwords customers scooped up at a fire sale.

<comment><USER3> Google paid 151M for Zagat - is that considered cheap? Would be surprised if the Frommer's price was even half that. [http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking- news/ci_21301531/google-...](http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking- news/ci_21301531/google-buys-frommers-travel-business-will-add-it)

<comment><USER4> When you think that Zagat - a world renowned service for restaurant ratings for over 30 years - was purchased for about 15% of what Instagram cost, I would say it's cheap.

I know new whiz-bang startups can generate a lot of cash (if they are lucky), but it always surprises me how low the valuation of old guard companies can be.

<comment><USER5> Comparing to Instagram, which even its defenders admit is an outlier, is poor choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google buys Zagat HN discussion, from Sept last year:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2974271>

</comment><comment><USER7> When I planned a trip to Spain, I use the Frommers 3 days guide in Madrid to plan activities.

<http://www.frommers.com/destinations/madrid/0056020791.html>

I then used Google Maps and created a custom map with all the suggested sites, activities, and eateries. I was also able to share it with my friends and collaborate over it.

I think this is a great opportunity for Google to streamline all this and make another great product.

<comment><USER8> I've do the the same thing for my trips and think it's great. If Google could integrate the travel guide content with the "view offline" feature in GMaps it would reduce the need for roaming too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I haven't looked at any in a very long time, but I recall Frommer's guidebooks as having the feel of McDonald's, relative to say Lonely Planet.

I'm eager for the Wikimedia Travel project to get underway <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Travel_Guide>

<comment><USER10> What about <http://wikitravel.org> ?

<comment><USER9> Assuming the Wikimedia Travel project gets off the ground, Wikitravel and its forks, or at least the material and active users and admins of these, will migrate to the new project.

Wikitravel is pretty good, but uneven depth of coverage. I usually read at least the main Wikipedia article and Wikitravel article about places I'm going to, and web search and sites like Yelp for details. Together this is a huge improvement over guidebooks. With more attention that a Wikimedia travel site would get, I'd expect even more/better for the types of things I look at Wikitravel for now, probably meaning I'd need to search/yelp/etc just a bit less.

(Of course most people would get to Wikimedia Travel via Google, and they could use WT content, so it'd be a win for Google just like Wikipedia, even if it made their purchase of Frommer's worth less.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd speculate that, just as with the Zagat purchase, they were singularly interested in a brand with recognition in those 40 years and older.

(Maybe since they are seeing the Google brand erode in quality and value to those under 40...)

<comment><USER12> Do the Frommer's and Zagat brands mean anything to those under 40? My instinct is that they probably don't.

<comment><USER13> I'm in my late twenties and I know both brands though I had almost zero interaction with Zagat in any purposeful sort of way. I never sought out a list of Zagat rated restaurants. I did use Frommer's for trip planning though often it was browsing in the bookstore or library rather than purchasing.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, though not entirely surprising. I'd surmise that your usage is representative the maximum utility for most people under 40.

Did you seek them out or did you discover them incidentally while in the respective "Travel" sections?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Vertical integration. Those who own content distribution (I.e. search) buy up the content. This solidifies / extends their unique ability to deliver relevant content.

A good analogy would be Comcast buying NBC. Of course google is at a higher scale than any previous distributor, so they can easily buy up lots of small but very valuable comtent producers.

Scary.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how this will affect Microsoft's Win 8 travel app, which seems to be using exclusively Frommer's content.

<comment><USER16> Frommer's has a rich licensing program. MS is only one of their partners. You can see how prominently their content is displayed in the NY Times travel section. [http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/europe/britain/engla...](http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/europe/britain/england/overview.html) I know there are many others, but they are escaping me at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm guessing many here don't know this, but travel agents today (yes they still exist) often recommend Frommer's guides.

I run KangaCruise.com, we considered syndicating Frommer's guides for destinations, and actually still haven't written it off.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Google paid around $25 million for Frommer's, according to a person briefed on the deal, which hasn't yet closed. But the deal is more significant for its strategy than its price tag." [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044477240457758...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444772404577587131075164366.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome, can't wait to see integration into google maps / location based services.

</comment><comment><USER19> this should help Google's antitrust battle.</comment>


Firefox Dev Tools: Box model highlighter, Web Console improvements - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/03/box-model-highlighter-web-console-improvements-firefox-os-hud-more-firefox-developer-tools-episode-30/ <comment><USER2> I'm going to guess that Chrome DevTools is going to fall behind Firefox by end of this year.

Today it's not possible for me to make the switch. There are some features that Firefox devtools is lacking from DevTools.

<comment><USER2> Here are some features I'm missing:

        Break on attribute or subtree modification
        HTML Node drag and drop (yup! Chrome DevTools have it)
        XPath (I use it for testing)
        FPS monitor and force repaint

<comment><USER3> I'm missing localStorage inspecting and editing. (If it's already there, please tell where :), I haven't really used Firefox developer tools much).

<comment><USER4> In the console you can type: inspect(localStorage)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, but that's not usable enough for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love all the work the Firefox team is doing here over the last year. Things have improved so much, its terrific. These are the things Firefox needs before I could start to consider it as a primary development tool:

\- Performance analyzation

\- Resource management (cookies, local storage, etc)

\- Option to completely disable cache when dev tools are open

\- Ability to search the document in the inspector

I'm sure they'll get there before too long.

<comment><USER6> Already has an option to disable the cache. Advanced settings.

<comment><USER5> Thank you!

Edit: I can't find it. I see I can disable the cache completely, but that's not really what I want. Its nice to only disable it when the dev tools are open. I don't want to have to go to advance settings and clear it every time.

<comment><USER6> Why specifically "when the dev tools are open"? That seems like an unusually specific request.

<comment><USER7> This is how Chrome DevTools do it (by default), and it's incredibly useful. When I'm just browsing websites I want the cache enabled, but when I'm working on a site (in which case I usually have the DevTools opened) I want the cache disabled. In fact, I now just open the DevTools when I want to temporarily disable caching -- because the keyboard shortcut is so ingrained it's a lot easier to do that then find the overall browser setting itself.

<comment><USER6> I know that's how Chrome DevTools does it, but "because that's how Chrome DevTools does it" is not a good answer to the question "why specifically when the DevTools are open".

<comment><USER8> Because you don't want to disable caching of every other sites when you are not wearing your developer hat, just a "regular user surfing internet" hat.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like a case for using separate Firefox profiles, one for each "hat."

<comment><USER8> Why do that when I can just press "F12"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish I could get a reference from the console command line to an object I printed in the console earlier.

For example: in my code I write console.log({ foo: function(msg) {...} }). The object is displayed as "[object Object]" (which isn't as good as Chrome's output by the way) and, sure, I can click it to inspect it,but what I'd like is, like, right-click->"Copy reference" and then it puts "$_(123)" in my clipboard, where $_ is a console-defined function which takes a number and returns the matching output of the console history.

Then I can use the referenced object in a new command: e.g. $_(123).foo('hello').

Firebug has $_ [1] but it's just for the last output of the command line (not the console history). (edit: likewise for Chrome [2])

Thank you for the many enhancements.

[1]: [https://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Command_Line_API#.24](https://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Command_Line_API#.24)

[2]: [https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer- tools/docs/co...](https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer- tools/docs/commandline-api#_)

</comment><comment><USER11> I love the look of the font preview. One of my major gripes with web fonts and listing multiple sources is not knowing which font rule is actually applying. Looks like this might solve my problem.

</comment><comment><USER12> Live editing JS and recompile doesn't seem to be possible from devtools. My experience with scratchpad doesn't do that so I have to fall back to Chrome when I want to edit JS loaded by the page on a third-party site. Is that still true?

<comment><USER13> You can use Cmd+E to re-evaluate individual functions: [http://fitzgeraldnick.com/weblog/52/](http://fitzgeraldnick.com/weblog/52/)

As far as full live editing goes, we have some refactoring and infrastructure work that needs to happen first that also blocks things like properly debugging eval'd strings and dynamically appended scripts. Its pretty high on our priority list and should be coming soonish!

<comment><USER12> Yeah. Thanks. Until then I can't :/ do you have the bug number?

<comment><USER13> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=771339](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=771339)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The box model highlighter looks great. This was the only reason keeping me from switching from firebug to dev tools entirely. Also, the other improvements are great news as well. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER15> Very cool, I like the Console to Inspector hookup that they added!

<comment><USER16> I thought you were referring to a way to connect my terminal to the browsers console.

I would love for there to be some node.js plugin where I could basically connect to the browser's js console.

<comment><USER17> You're looking for something like [https://github.com/harthur/fxconsole](https://github.com/harthur/fxconsole)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting they've added option to hide buttons, but kept huge icons on tabs, chrome used to have similar ugly icons, but fortunately they are removed now.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there about:config option to disable grouping of console.* messages like in firebug? Otherwise I lose their order, which is not helpful.

<comment><USER20> there's no such option for now, but we have a bug report:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704252](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704252)

<comment><USER19> It's an old bug. I'll keep an eye on it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can you edit and save to a local HTML file?</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most up-to-date way of resource for OpenCV 3? - <AUTHOR> Every single book that I have tried to pick up uses an outdated version of the API. So apart from directly looking at the OpenCV documentation, what book or resource is MOST useful & updated in picking up OpenCV rapidly? <comment><USER2> In my opinion, the new opencv3 book is the way to go. It was released this past January.

Learning OpenCV 3: Computer Vision in C++ with the OpenCV Library

That's a great book to learn opencv in c++, but you are probably going to pay for it, since it's so new.

If you are looking for a free alternative, you can learn opencv3 from the Python tutorials, then learn the c++ side from the documentation.

Opencv 2.x is very translatable to opencv3.x, so I'm pretty sure learning opencv from older tutorials would still be a great option also.</comment>


Building Node.js projects with Travis /by assaf - <AUTHOR> http://labnotes.org/2011/08/10/building-node-js-projects-with-travis/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for the info. I added my npm module (<https://github.com/srveit/mechanize-js>) to Travis</comment>


Facebook Home = Trojan Horse - <AUTHOR> http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/04/facebook-home-trojan-horse/

<comment><USER2> One could say the same thing about the Amazon experience, or the ROM community with projects like MIUI. As far as I'm concerned it's healthy for the mobile eco system and in essence is exactly why the Android OS was built the way it was.</comment>


Google Reader cutting internal social features, integrating into Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/upcoming-changes-to-reader-new-look-new.html

<comment><USER4> This is horrifyingly frustrating. It's like when they started adding people from my email contacts to my Google Talk friends list or when they thought my gtalk friends list needed to be all up in my Google Reader friends list. Google don't seem to understand the natural partitioning of social spaces that occurs in the real world.

(I do concur that Circles allow this partitioning to be modeled much more accurately than most other social networking systems, but the partitioning before was entirely organic and natural, not constructed. I will wait and see how well they implement the integration before conclusively declaring Reader to have jumped the shark, but honestly the social features ("just enough social to get by", which is about as much social as I can put up with) were the only things keeping me on Reader up until this point.

<comment><USER5> I have the exact opposite experience. I find it horribly frustrating to have all these contacts in different services surfaced to me in weird inconsistent ways.

GTalk are for me a subset of email contacts.

I'm ecstatic that G+ sharing is being integrated with GReader, because I share a lot on GReader, but not everything I share is pertinent to all of my GReader friends.

Ideally, they'll add a "public circles" feature or something like it, that allows people to subscribe to specific subjects that I define and share to specifically, which would be public, but not pushed into everyone's main timelines.

[Edit: To expand a bit, I hope we'll be able to view those public circles in Reader, since that's the ideal interface for it, and not just in Plus.]

[Edit 2: Thinking a bit more about it, I think I'd prefer to consume all Plus content (except maybe photos, I really like the gallery layout) in the Reader UI. I simply find it to be more efficient.

<comment><USER4> Here's the problem: when I share something on Reader, I know that it will only be seen on Reader by my other friends who have specifically opted-in to say "I want to see stuff Nathan has shared". It is very reasonable to add a feature allowing me to comment on these shared items, since that's a pretty big value add.

When I share something to Plus, now it shows up to people who are on Plus. They are not in "let's read my RSS feeds" mode, they're in "let's see what my friends are up to" mode. My shared article, instead of being just another item to read and potentially comment on, has intruded on their social activity. If they wanted to read about quantum tunneling, they would have gone to Reader, not to Plus. Plus is where you go to read about your cousin's new haircut.

<comment><USER5> Sure, I agree. But the problem is, what about the people who are on Reader to read about souffles? They don't want to read about quantum tunneling. But you sometimes post about both.

You're describing a distinction that exists on a service level now, that's basically arbitrary and inconsistent. With everything pushed to Plus and pulled back out of Plus, you can define not only social contexts like 'friends,' 'co-workers,' and 'family,' but also subject matter like 'souffles' and 'quantum tunneling.' This is a good thing.

N.B. I think this will only be truly useful if they add public circles as I describe earlier.

<comment><USER6> Based on the arguments presented here, I agree that using the contexts that users set up in G+ makes sense. Having said that, I think the part that isn't clear to everyone (well, myself anyway) is whether things will be "pulled back out of Plus". I really hope they will, but...

<comment><USER5> I wonder about it, too, but this gives me hope:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019052>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google has a lot of redundant social features in other products. This makes sense. I hope they remove the "like" buttons from Youtube, too, and replace them with +1.

<comment><USER8> Where's dislike going to go?

I hope they take the Like button on youtube and make it Press +1 rather than getting rid of like and dislike.

<comment><USER7> I don't think the "dislike" button is good for the web. If you agree with something vote it, if not don't. You don't have a dislike vote in electoral campaigns.

<comment><USER9> Strongly disagree. Sure, when there is a dislike button a few people use it in an abusive way, but it's obvious that this is statistical noise. But when a majority of votes on a YouTube video consists of 'dislikes' there's usually an excellent reason. The result of having only positive voting is SEO, blogspam, and content farming. Hell yes I want the option to downvote things.

<comment><USER10> giving users a dislike option encourages crowdsourced censorship - <USER2> don't just downvote content they don't like, they downvote content they disagree with. look at reddit for a prime example of how allowing everybody to downvote encourages groupthink. additionally, a publicly available dislike button discourages content creation: people who might otherwise post original content start to get nervous about how it will be received if there is a capacity to express dislike.

a button to flag for review is one thing, but hiding content purely based on public user input is generally not so great. imho, HN has a great system of only allowing high-karma accounts to access the power of the downvote. it's a similar idea to selecting community moderators to go over any content flagged for review, but just a little more automated.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. Reddit is extremely diverse in opinion because anyone can set up their own sub-boards, and every content creator I know fears apathy more than controversy - not least because many creative folk are poor self-promoters. Overwhelmingly negative publicity can still lead to commercial success, viz. Rebecca Black.

It will always be possible to search without preference filters, because there's an economic incentive to providing all-inclusive indexing decoupled from the ratings system. However, being able to express only approval inevitably leads to a crowding-out problem; witness the ever-expanding ration of ad to content and the plethora of competing buttons to like/+1/tweet/digg/zzzz.

Lately I find myself filtering more and more; after blocking disqus, for example, I can't see comments on most news stories any more and this has been a signal improvement. I was a big booster for the democratization of the communication commons back in the 1990s, demanding that every media outlet put public comment facilities on its websites so that everyone could have their say on news stories and so forth. Boy, did I get that one wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Each time a prompt for an alternative news reader appears, this one seems to get some attention: <http://www.newsblur.com/>

I personally just use the newsreader built into Opera now. Just good enough for my needs.

<comment><USER12> NewsBlur gets attention here because it's built by an active HNer, me. And it's entirely open-source: <http://github.com/samuelclay>. Follow me on GitHub to watch how quickly NewsBlur grows everyday.

In fact, the NewsBlur iPhone app is also open-source: [https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/master/media/iph...](https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/master/media/iphone). This might be very helpful to somebody learning how to write an iPhone app on their own. I plan to blog about all the techniques and tricks I learned, from the perspective of a Python/JavaScript developer.

<comment><USER13> Just created an account and imported my Google Reader feeds. I like what I've tried so far, but it doesn't look like there's an option to sort feeds by oldest first. (Maybe no one else sorts this way, but it's the way that makes sense for how I read feeds.)

<comment><USER12> By oldest first, you mean oldest stories first? This is a prioritized feature: [http://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/reading_from_old_...](http://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/reading_from_old_to_new). I've been sitting on it since very few users have asked for it, but I have intentions of building it one day soon.

<comment><USER13> Yes, exactly that. And personally, I'd make it a global option, but a per-feed option -- either in addition or instead of the global option -- would be fine with me as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Honestly, I've always been extremely confused by the Google Reader sharing mechanism. I use Reader all the time, but I've never been clear on who exactly the shares go to. This is much better, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER15> Do many people use these features? Most of the people that I know who use Google Reader, myself included, just use it as an RSS reader. Sending it to other social networks is the one thing that I do use, and they won't be changing that.

<comment><USER16> >Do many people use these features?

I am a heavy user of the information on how many users are subscribed to a particular feed, which could be considered a social feature. (The information is behind the "show details" link in the "view onto" a feed.)

also, I am subscribed to one other user's "shared link blog" (a view assembled by Reader of that user's "shared items"), which the OP says is definitely going away, and three users are subscribed to my shared link blog.

The "shared link blog" that I am subscribed to is at <http://www.google.com/reader/shared/patrissimo> although admittedly it is no longer active as the writer (actually, "editor" or "sharer" is more accurate) has moved to using Twitter for sharing links (which I do not like as much).

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I'm a bit lost. Is there an intrinsic difference between just following someone in Reader and "shared link blogs", or am I just getting tripped up on naming?

<comment><USER16> There is a big difference, which is likely to become apparent just by inspecting an example of a shared link blog. Let me repeat the URL of the one I am subscribed to:

<http://www.google.com/reader/shared/patrissimo>

The difference between an ordinary blog and a shared link blog is that in a shared link blog, the posts (I want to call them "items" but know of no one else who calls them that, so "posts" it is) are written by people other than the owner (i.e., "patrissimo") of the shared link blog. All "patrissimo" did to put the post in the shared link blog was to check the box labelled "Share" or the box labelled "Share with note" at the bottom of every post in Reader (where the box labelled "Mark as read" is also to be found).

Well, more precisely, if he checked "Share with note", he also had to type in text of the note to be attached to the post. And there is a bookmarklet that he could have used instead of checking one of the two aforementioned boxes.

<comment><USER6> Right, I get that. So when they say they're going to retire "friending, following and shared link blogs", presumably that means that the link above will no longer exist.

My question, then, was whether or not we'll still be able to share within Reader and see items shared by other people. Based on what I've read on this post and elsewhere, it seems that the answer to my question is no - <USER3> that functionality is being moved to G+. Which seems to me to be a rather strange interaction.

<comment><USER16> Well, even if we'll still be able to share within Reader, what I like a lot about way it currently works is that the information about who shared what is available to services other than Google without any hacky screen scraping. I am not going to take the trouble to "curate" (or vote on or whatever you want to call it) web pages or blog posts if the fruits of my curation (or voting) are going to be restricted to one company's walled garden.

Note that making the information public might not be the current _default_ behavior of shared link blogs, but if it is not the current default behavior, then for those users like me and "patrissimo" who have opted to make the information public, the information is (as far as I know -- I guess it could be disallowed by Google Reader's terms of service) available to all services on a non-discriminatory basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I actually like these news. I've been using Reader since it came out (what's it? 6 years?) but never get to use to their social features.

Also: star, like, share, tag. Those are too many options. Give me a +1 and a "Share" button and I'm set.

I thought this discussion needed a thread that wasn't all "I hate change".

<comment><USER18> No, they're not too many options. (Well, possibly Star, since it's basically a Tag).

Tagging is very different from sharing or liking. It's a feature for organizing specific items (aka posts) for yourself, not for others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really don't care about any social features in Google Reader. The only thing that matters to me is I can continue easily subscribe and read RSS feeds. And with a "brand new design that we hope you love", I sincerely hope they don't fuck that up.

<comment><USER20> I can't wait for those huge margins to waste my screen space.

<comment><USER18> <http://userstyles.org/stylish>

<comment><USER20> Stylish themes are often out of date and/or completely change the layout of the site when all I really want is a small tweak here or there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I worry that, in an effort to compete with Facebook, Google is going to ruin everything I liked about their products.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm sure Google considered this but I hope that by default, my feed subscriptions are shared with nobody in my Google+ circles and that I have to opt those people in. Doing otherwise would be the equivalent of dumping the contents of your browser bookmarks for all your friends to see. There may be some things people subscribe to that they'd prefer others didn't know about.

<comment><USER23> sharing is already opt in on Google Reader. So you would have to click "share" and then (most likely) select a circle, there will probably be a default circle but it won't just start spamming G+ whenever you read an article

<comment><USER24> I realize that. The problem is that they block things by URL in whatever web proxy they use, and if content for Google Reader is coming from a blocked url, it's not going to work for me anymore.

It works both ways; I can actually send mail from my Gmail account via Google Reader, even though they block Gmail. I can't read it, of course, but it's a bit of a hole in their security plan.

<comment><USER23> Who is they? are you worried about not being able to access reader anymore because access to G+ may be blocked? That is interesting. Do you have trouble with the new share box on google search because it is a G+ product? Where are you from?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting that all the replies here are negative. Am I really the only one who welcomes these changes? Of the people I want to share with, only a few also use Reader. There are much more of them on Google+. This also allows for more fine-grained sharing, so I won't have to share programming-related posts with people who are not interested in that kind of article.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm mostly upset that Google Reader will now be blocked at work, because the IT dept blocks all social network sites.

<comment><USER26> Google Reader had social features before.

Github has social features, too; perhaps they should try to block that and see how well that goes over. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Without some sort of "public circles" option on Google+, people won't be able to subscribe to my "techstuff" feed--I'd need to manually "subscribe" them. Pretty icky.

<comment><USER28> Do shared circles count as "public circles"?

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_users_can_n...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_plus_users_can_now_share_their_circles.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Awaits the "Best alternatives to Reader" post appearing on HN

<comment><USER30> <http://newsblur.com>

<comment><USER31> It's nice that newsblur is maintained by a HNer, but the aesthetics of it are a real turn off for me.

<comment><USER32> This isn't exactly the best first impression ever: <http://i.imgur.com/r2vwo.png>

<comment><USER12> Went ahead and fixed that: [https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/commit/658a15701af7b6...](https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/commit/658a15701af7b641d7bc5a3d20af241709cf3b8b)

<comment><USER32> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The first thing I do when I log into Google Reader is mark all "shared items" as read, without reading any of them. I don't want my RSS reader to be social. I don't want my unread count to reflect sources that I didn't opt into. The sooner I can disable all social aspects of Google Reader, the sooner I stop looking for an alternative.

<comment><USER34> May I ask why you decided to subscribe to other people's shared items if you don't like reading them?

<comment><USER33> I followed these people on Buzz. If you unfollow them on Reader you also unfollow them on Buzz, or at least that's the way it used to work. If that's changed please let me know how to unfollow people on Reader without affecting Buzz or Plus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> One vote against. I love Google Reader. I have intelligent friends that share actively on it. I don't use Google Plus. I don't know if those friends use Google Plus. Now, I won't read the articles that my friends are sharing. I also expect sharing will go down as Google forcibly alters user behavior and manages an adoption problem.

In effect, Google is now impeding my access to great information. That's counter to their mission, isn't it? And it's risky to do this to a very loyal user group. Google Reader users are passionate about this product.

</comment><comment><USER36> Great. I knew this day would come.

Guess I need to speed up my work on a Google Reader replacement.

<comment><AUTHOR> The latter is _exactly_ what I thought!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I find it ironic that the blog post does not have a "Share to google+", or the "+1 Button"

<comment><USER38> It does have a +1 button. Maybe you have it adblocked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> None of this is frustrating and it shouldn't come to a shock to anyone. Google stated that they were going to deeply integrate Google+ into all its products. This is them just following through.

</comment><comment><USER40> And yet the blog post itself is linked to Digg and not G+

Oh Google :(

</comment><comment><USER41> Forgive me for what might be huge ignorance and stupidity on my part but does this mean that I'm now required to have a G+ account to use Reader?

<comment><USER18> Louis Gray (G+ evangelist, hired by Google) said in a different site[1] the following:

 _To clarify, Google Reader remains a stand-alone product. What is being announced is threefold: 1) Addition of sharing to Google+. 2) A new modern design. 3) Retiring of the dedicated sharing model.

This statement ( It will be impossible to use Google Reader as a standalone product) is incorrect. You can continue reading your feeds in Reader independent of Google+._

So it seems we (non-G+ users) won't be affected.

[1]: [http://www.extremetech.com/computing/101011-6-google- reader-...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/101011-6-google-reader- replacements#dsq-comment-23863)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The interesting thing is how they are cutting some features to "improve" it. I suspect that when it's done, it will be impossible to send items to Twitter or Facebook from it (you'll have to send things to Google+ instead).

It's also a big question as to what you can do to save your starred items moving forward. Anyone wants to build a starred items to delicious exporter?

<comment><USER43> The article says "in addition to Google+, you'll still be able to share to almost any service using Send To". Also, I'm not sure what you mean about starred items, they're not going anywhere.

<comment><USER42> Today, I can have a service that looks at my link blog (generated by clicking share) and its RSS feed. By doing so, it can then route new items to Twitter or other services. Reading what the blog entry says, it looks like "Send To" will be the way to route things to other services instead of using Share.

Today, by just clicking "share" I can send the information to Twitter. What the new experience will be, I suspect, is that I will have to click "send to" then choose the service I want to share to. 2 steps instead of one.

It's a small product difference but one that will reduce friction for Google Plus while increasing it for "other" services.</comment></comment></comment>


Civic Tech Needs of San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://startupinresidence.org/about/city-challenges/san-francisco-challenges/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wish this format would be adopted by more institutions and industries, where there would be open discourse about the problems faced that have potential technology solutions -- it would certainly encourage more entrepreneurs to work on those problems.</comment>